The Unbelievable Mr. Ripley

Before he was a museum namesake, television and radio host, lecturer, author, and freak-show magnate, Robert Ripley was a simple newspaper illustrator with a zest for explaining the impossible. Along the way to international fame, he accumulated knowledge of thousands of oddities, girlfriends from around the world, a curio-stuffed house on a private island—and who could forget that dried whale penis? In an excerpt adapted from his new book, A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley, author Neal Thompson retraces the brilliant and belief-beggaring career of a man whose name lives on in American culture as a symbol of wit and wonder.

Robert Ripley hard at work at his drawing board, 1942. Entirely self-taught, Ripley would sell his first cartoon to Life magazine in 1908., From A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made his treacherous solo voyage across the Atlantic, flying his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis nonstop from New York to Paris and becoming an instant hero for accomplishing a feat long thought to be impossible—crossing an ocean in a day and a half; traveling 60 miles an hour for more than 3,000 miles; flying alone through the night, through storms, without sleep. It was the most daring and astounding achievement of its day.

Months later, Robert Ripley—a connoisseur of mosts and bests, of fastest and furthest—featured Lindy in his popular syndicated New York Evening Post cartoon, Believe It or Not. Instead of heaping more praise on the aviator, however, he declared that Lindbergh was not the first but the 67th man to make a nonstop flight across the Atlantic. Thousands of irate readers sent incredulous letters and telegrams, berating Ripley for insulting an American icon, and calling him all sorts of names, primarily a liar.

At the time, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was nearing its 10th anniversary. Although he and his cartoon weren’t yet household names, for a decade Ripley had entertained and taunted readers with hundreds of illustrated bits of arcana—the armless man who played the piano, the chicken that lived 17 days with its head cut off—and the public had responded with increasing loyalty and, at times, anger and frustration. Despite Ripley’s avowal that everything in his cartoon was absolutely true, many readers simply refused to believe him, and they wrote letters, sometimes thousands each day. The letter writers had even created their own fad, addressing envelopes simply to “Rip,” while others wrote backwards, upside down, in Braille, Hebrew, shorthand, semaphore, or Morse code (“.-. .. .--.” equals “Rip”)—or to “The Biggest Liar in the World.” When Ripley sponsored a contest seeking readers’ own Believe It or Nots, he received 2.5 million letters in two weeks. (The winner: Clinton Blume, who was swimming at a Brooklyn beach when he found the monogrammed hairbrush he’d lost in 1918 when his ship was sunk by a German U-boat.)

During the Depression, as Americans sought affordable means of escape and entertainment, Ripley provided both. His cartoons appeared in more than 300 newspapers around the world, in dozens of languages, and were read by many millions. With a $100,000-plus salary from newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, beginning in 1929, followed by endorsement deals, speaking engagements, and earnings from his best-selling books, radio shows, movies, and museums, he was earning well over half a million dollars a year during the height of the Depression. By 1936, a newspaper poll found, Ripley was more popular than James Cagney, President Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, and even Lindbergh.

Along the way, Ripley had discovered that remote lands and bizarre facts were only strange and fascinating in “kinship” to people’s own lives. “Facts, to be interesting, must be very close or very far away,” Ripley believed. His mission was to prove to readers that veracity and reality were elusive—Buffalo Bill never shot a buffalo, for example; he shot bison; Ireland’s St. Patrick wasn’t Irish or Catholic, and his name wasn’t Patrick—and that sometimes you can’t recognize truth until someone shines a sharp light on a subject, as Ripley did when his cartoon divulged that the “Star Spangled Banner,” based on a crude English drinking song, had never been formally adopted as the American national anthem, which led to a 1931 petition to Congress bearing five million signatures, and the anthem’s official adoption.

The truth about Lindbergh was this: two aviators named Alcock and Brown had flown together from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919, and that same year, a dirigible carrying 31 men had crossed from Scotland to the United States; five years later, another dirigible had traveled from Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey, with 33 people aboard. That meant 66 people had crossed the Atlantic nonstop before Lindbergh.

“I think mine is the only business in which the customer is never right,” Ripley once said. “Being called untruthful is to me a compliment. And as long as I continue to receive the lion’s share of this odd form of flattery, I don’t worry about a wolf being at my door.” He roamed constantly, obsessively searching for strange facts and faces for his cartoon. He would visit scores of countries, meeting headhunters and cannibals, royalty and beggars. He loved to brag about his trip to Hell (a rural Norwegian village) and the 152-degree day spent in Tripoli. He met holy men in India, bedouins in Persia and Iraq, topless villagers in Africa and New Guinea. Most of the trips were funded by William Randolph Hearst, whose publicists came up with a nickname for Ripley: the Modern Marco Polo.

In addition to a town house overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park and a hacienda in Florida, he owned a mansion on a private island north of New York, crammed with curios collected from around the world, with a staff of servants and a group of adoring girlfriends referred to by friends as his “harem.” He was a goofy everyman whose limited education and simplistic worldview matched that of his core readership, but whose voracious curiosity and capacity for hard work and entrepreneurship led to the unintended creation of an empire that would far outlive him.

By glorifying freakish accomplishments, Ripley stoked a culture of what he called “misdirected Lindberghs”—a foreshadowing of YouTube, reality TV, and other pop-culture phenomena, from Fear Factor to America’s Funniest Home Videos to Jackass—in which people yearned to see their strange accomplishments, their disfigurements and curious misfortunes, reimagined inside a Believe It or Not rectangle. Ripley never mocked the efforts of men such as E. L. Blystone, who wrote 1,615 letters of the alphabet on a grain of rice, or the two German railroad workers who drank 372 glasses of beer in 17 hours, or Jim White, who towed cars with his teeth, or the father and son, each missing a leg, who shared pairs of shoes, or the Chinese-American baby born the day of Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight, whose parents named him One Long Hop. Ripley celebrated and defended the achievements of the masses. “Don’t insult Mr. Blystone’s ego,” he’d say. “Could Lindbergh do that? . . . Could you?”

And yet, though he was a public figure for 40 years, no one knew the real story, the real Ripley. When he died, in 1949, he left behind no children. He had been divorced for 25 years. He had collected many girlfriends, sometimes living with three or four at once, but they all seemed to disappear after his death, some back to the countries from which they’d come. He died before telling his own story.

Ripley and some unidentified ladies enjoy a boat-ride on the pond behind his mansion. Friends referred to Ripley’s group of adoring girlfriends as his “harem.”, From A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley.

LeRoy Robert Ripley was born in Santa Rosa, California, in 1890 (though he’d later fudge the date to make himself three or four years younger). His father, a carpenter, died when Ripley was 15, and a year later the 1906 earthquake flattened his hometown. His mother did laundry and took in boarders. Ripley had a disfiguring set of buck teeth—not fixed until much later in life—and, though a fine athlete, was noticeably shy. When not in school, he worked part-time jobs, delivering newspapers and polishing headstones at a classmate’s father’s marble-works company. What he really wanted to do was draw pictures. Entirely self-taught, he became a talented artist and in high school joined the staff of the newspaper and the yearbook. In 1908 he sold a cartoon to Life magazine, featuring a pretty woman pushing laundry through a wringer. The caption read, “The Village Bell Was Slowly Ringing.” He was paid $8.

In 1909, Ripley moved to San Francisco to become a sports cartoonist at the Bulletin. He landed next at the rival *Chronicle.*While covering a 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, in Reno, he met Jack London and other writers who, impressed by Ripley’s cartoons, advised him to move to New York. After numerous rejections, Ripley was hired at the lowly New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser (whose editors suggested that he ditch “LeRoy” and use his middle name, Robert). His timing was ideal: the paper had just partnered with the Associated Newspapers syndicate, which meant his sports cartoons would be reprinted in papers across the country. Based partly on Ripley’s popular third-of-a-page sports sketches, the *Globe’*s circulation rose steadily, and he was rewarded with plum assignments, including trips to Europe, tours with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and visits to stateside military bases during World War I.

In late 1918, on a slow sports day, Ripley cobbled together a cartoon featuring nine small sketches of men performing unique sports feats—one man had stayed under water for six and a half minutes, another had walked backwards across the North American continent. He entitled the cartoon, Champs and Chumps, and a year later created a similar cartoon, this time changing the title to Believe It or Not. A third Believe It or Not cartoon followed in 1920.

A brief marriage to a teenaged Ziegfeld Follies dancer ended in divorce—Ripley preferred New York’s rambunctious nightlife to the quiet charms of domesticity. He moved into a small apartment at the New York Athletic Club, on Central Park South, where he excelled at handball and won numerous tournaments. He’d also developed a passion for travel. The Globe sent him to the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920, and two years later on an around-the-world trip depicted in a series of essays and sketches called “Ripley’s Ramble ’Round the World.”

Ripley poses with his inaugural 1918 Believe it or Not cartoon (originally titled “Champs and Chumps”)., From A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley.

By 1926 Ripley was at the Evening Post, a gray and serious paper in desperate need of levity. He decided to rejuvenate Believe It or Not. He started by making a salesman’s pitch to his new readership, promising that his Believe It or Nots “are all true,” and if any readers questioned the facts, he’d “prove the truth” to any doubters. “Truth, you know, is really stranger than fiction,” he wrote. “I have traveled the world over searching for strange and unbelievable things . . . I have seen white negroes, purple white men, and I know a man who was hanged but still lives . . . Believe me when I tell you about the man who died of old age before he was six years old; the river in Africa that runs backwards; oysters that grow on trees; flowers that eat mice; fish that walk and snakes that fly.” Soon, Ripley was introducing readers to such characters as James Thompson, of Clovis, New Mexico, who traveled across the country entirely by wheelchair; Mary Rosa, a Nantucket toddler who found her mother’s ring on the beach, 21 years after it had been lost; two brothers in Russia who slapped each other’s faces for 36 hours straight; and Haru Onuki, a beautiful Japanese prima donna he’d recently met (and begun dating) who required one full day to prepare her hair, which then stayed in place for a month.

As America grew more urban and urbane, newspaper readers had developed Jazz Age tastes for new kinds of journalism, and publishers were tripping over themselves to accommodate those tastes. Cartoons, photographs, and color printing were more popular than ever, as were sexy, gossipy stories. Leading the way (up or down was a matter of debate) were the half-sized papers known as tabloids. The Daily News, unveiled in 1919 as the nation’s first true tabloid, had been followed in 1924 by the Evening Graphic, created by Bernarr Macfadden, the eccentric and fabulously wealthy health guru whose magazines Ripley had read as a boy. Macfadden’s credo—“sex on every front page, big gobs of it”—had prompted Hearst to enter the tabloid game that same year, launching the New York Daily Mirror, which he described as “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information.”

Intellectuals and highbrow writers likened tabloids to addictive drugs, fretting that they’d precipitate the demise of American culture. However that may be, tabloids quickly became the highest-circulation publications in New York.

Ever since childhood, Robert Ripley had displayed what an early profile writer called a “bottomless, off-kilter curiosity.” He was a man whose mind was “uncluttered by culture,” as one colleague put it: “Everything was new to him.”

A friend recalled once dining with Ripley. While they awaited their meals, Ripley calculated how many steaks a full-grown steer produced and how many steers lived in Texas. By the time dinner arrived, Ripley had figured there were enough steaks in Texas to feed the entire population of Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula three times a day for 18 and a half years.

When it came to cartoons featuring some math, science, or history puzzler, Ripley increasingly relied on the help of a silent partner, Norbert Pearlroth, a former banker and accomplished linguist with a near photographic memory. Ripley had hired Pearlroth in 1923 as a part-time research assistant. He eventually quit his bank job to work full time for Ripley, a job he would hold for half a century (until long after Ripley died), happily contributing to what he called “fairy tales for grown ups.” With Pearlroth’s input, Ripley created more cartoons that seemed intentionally designed to earn stacks of skeptical if not outright angry letters. Napoleon crossed the Red Sea—on dry land. U.S. Naval hero John Paul Jones was not an American citizen, did not command a fleet of American ships, and his name was not “Jones.” Ripley even found a way to make this statement: “George Washington was not the first president of the United States.” (A man named John Hanson, who signed the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution, was briefly elected “president of the United States in Congress assembled.”) Ripley and Pearlroth worked hard to find startling statements to engage and enrage their readers. Ripley loved to be called a liar, because he loved proving that his shockers were true. One admiring writer said Ripley seemed to be “always waiting, with his authority in his hand, like a club.”

In just two years at the Post, Ripley was becoming a celebrity. Believe It or Not was syndicated in a hundred papers in the United States and Canada. Its creator was receiving at least a hundred letters a day, sometimes as many as 1,000 a week.

By now, Ripley had learned (thanks to a calming cupful of liquor) to tame the stage fright that had dogged him since childhood. So when the Nomad Lecture Bureau asked him to talk onstage about his work and his travels, and to draw a few sketches, Ripley agreed to take his Believe It or Not stories on the road for a nationwide series of lectures. At some, he was billed or introduced as the “World’s Biggest Liar,” and Ripley kept stoking the theme. In a speech to a group of athletes, he joked, “It makes no difference what I say. You won’t believe me anyway.” At most of his lectures, he was asked the same question: Where do you find the things you draw about? Speaking to the Advertising Club of New York, he explained that he got some of his ideas from readers, some from encyclopedias, and some in his dreams. The short answer he usually gave was: “Everywhere, all the time.”

His curiosity seemed to compel him to travel relentlessly, throughout Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. His favorite, ever since his first visit to China and India during his 1922–23 circumnavigation, was the Far East, the spice-scented alleys of Shanghai and the self-flagellating Hindu rituals in the Indian holy city of Benares, which he told readers was home to “the weirdest collection of humanity on the face of the earth.” Ripley’s travels, combined with Pearlroth’s knowledge of the world and facility with languages, added an exotic flair and worldly tone to the Believe It or Not cartoons, earning Ripley a reputation as a real-life Indiana Jones.

*From left,*meeting members of a tribal dance group in Port Moresby, New Guinea, 1932. Fresh off the plane in New York City Harbor after a three-month South East Asia trip, Ripley forces a smile for the crowd—he hated to fly. Posing with one of his many shrunken heads, Ripley bought his first one for $100 from a Bolivian tribe in 1925., Photographs From A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley.

Ripley introduced readers to a widening cast of unbelievable characters: sword swallowers, people who ate glass, a man who nailed his tongue to a piece of wood, another who lifted weights with a hook sunk through his tongue, a woman missing the lower half of her body. He sketched men with horns on their heads, a child cyclops, an armless golfer, a fork-tongued woman. There were fish that climbed trees, wingless birds, four-legged chickens, peg-legged cows. He loved quirks of language, word puzzles, palindromes. What was the longest curse word? Forty letters. How many four-letter words are there for God? Thirty-seven. Though he never finished high school, he had developed (with Pearlroth’s assistance) his own unique mathematical skills and loved sharing number problems with readers. He once claimed there were trillions of ways to make change for a five-dollar bill, and it would take a century to conduct all those transactions. One cartoon featured a dead man with a knife in his chest and three witnesses. “If someone was murdered at midnight,” said the cutline, “and everyone who was told about it told two other people within twelve minutes, everyone on earth would know about it by morning.”

Everything had a Believe It or Not angle—science, religion, literature. A nickel-sized coin made up of star matter would weigh 200 pounds; a bundle of spiderwebs no larger than a pea, if untangled and straightened out, would stretch 350 miles; a ship weighs less sailing East than sailing West. And the shortest letter ever mailed? That would be Victor Hugo’s one-character missive to his publishers, inquiring about his Les Misérables manuscript. The character: “?” And the reply: “!”

While Ripley loved being called a liar, he hated to be wrong, knowing it would damage the cartoon if he earned a reputation for sloppy research. He depended on Pearlroth to prove him right. Ripley’s staff now included a secretary and two assistants to read letters and check facts. Pearlroth’s official title was “linguist.” He left his Brooklyn home early each morning and took the subway into Manhattan. Some days he’d visit the Post offices to sift through the mail, helping other staffers respond to people who had challenged a Ripley statement. Some days he’d go straight to the New York Public Library’s central branch on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, where he was usually one of the first to walk between the twin lion statues and up the front steps. He’d spend his day sifting through card catalogues and flipping through books in the ornate third-floor reading room, skipping lunch. Beneath the towering carved-wood ceiling, he sometimes wandered around, scanning shelves, sampling books, scribbling notes until his eyes grew bleary. He learned how to make photostat copies of the pages so that Ripley had a picture to copy for his sketch. Librarians knew Pearlroth by name and would have to ask him to leave at closing time. He’d arrive home well past dinner, sometimes as late as 11 p.m., and rarely saw his children during the week.

Ripley himself spent far more time at nightclubs and at parties than in libraries. Along with his cartoonist sidekick Bugs Baer and the crusty columnist Damon Runyon, he became a regular at the midtown speakeasy run by Texas Guinan, who greeted customers with her trademark “Hello, sucker.” At cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s apartment, Ripley rubbed elbows with the Marx Brothers, George Gershwin, and Fanny Brice. One night, the petite shimmy-and-shake Ziegfeld star Anne Pennington brought down the house with a rowdy dance on the hardwood floors, while in another room Harry Houdini performed a trick in which he swallowed sewing needles and then pulled them out of his throat, threaded on a string.

Max Schuster was a savvy editor, and an even savvier marketeer. He and his equally astute partner, Dick Simon, had teamed up in 1924 to publish the first-ever book of crossword puzzles. First introduced by the New York World, in 1913, crossword puzzles had become popular features in many papers. Simon’s aunt was a fanatic crossworder, and her failure to find a book of puzzles inspired her nephew to publish one.

With only a shared secretary between them, the two men created their own company, Simon and Schuster, to publish The Cross-Word Puzzle Book—with a cute little pencil attached—and it became an instant best-seller. Within a year, the duo published three more crossword-puzzle books and sold more than a million of them, eventually establishing the firm as a serious publishing house. Now Max Schuster wanted Ripley to put a collection of cartoons, essays, and sketches between hard covers. Schuster had been cultivating Ripley for years.

In time, Ripley realized that a book might be the perfect place to use his backlog of material, and he signed on. Ripley’s 188-page Believe It or Not book went on sale in January of 1929, for $2.50, and the response was immediate, loud, and uniformly laudatory. Rube Goldberg praised the book’s “striking innovation”—“you have no peer,” he told Ripley—and Winchell devoted a full column in the Evening Graphic to Ripley’s “most interesting and most fascinating book . . . the sort of tome you cannot put down.” As the book climbed the best-seller lists, Ripley was showered with offers. *Collier’*s invited him to contribute a regular cartoon feature to the magazine. A company called Famous Speakers, Inc. offered a dozen lectures. He was soon being wooed by radio networks looking for ways to capture the Believe It or Not magic on the airwaves.

Max Schuster had wisely sent one of the first copies of Ripley’s book to William Randolph Hearst. After Hearst read it, he sent a wire to one of his editors in New York. It contained two words: “HIRE RIPLEY.” Ripley did not need much persuading, with Hearst offering a $1,200 a week salary plus a hefty share of the Believe it or Not sales profits, worth about $100,000 a year. He jumped with his cartoon to Hearst’s King Features Syndicate, and would remain there for the rest of his life.

Success bred more success. By 1934, NBC had signed Ripley to a radio show (at $3,000 per half hour). Ripley negotiated further book deals with Simon & Schuster. When he renewed his contract with King Features, it was worth $7,000 a week. Twentieth Century Fox wanted a series of Believe It or Not movies. Ripley commanded $1,000 a night for a lecture. He was earning more than any cartoonist in the business. In 1933, at the Chicago World’s Fair, he inaugurated a new side venture, Ripley’s “Odditorium”—a gussied-up freak show. (Ripley would create more Odditoriums, including a Times Square flagship, precursors to the scores of Believe It or Not museums now operating around the world.) Ripley now had the means to live wherever and however he wished. He chose the town of Mamaroneck, just north of New York City, and bought an island for himself. Using his acronym for “Believe It or Not,” he called it BION Island.

Ripley bought the island for $85,000 from John Eberson, an architect who had designed hundreds of movie theaters across the country but lost his fortune in the Depression. To reach the island, Ripley had to cross a tight stone causeway leading out to three acres of lawns, gardens, tall pine trees, rocky outcroppings, and swampy marshes. The island’s centerpiece was a 28-room English-style manor, stucco and stone with wood trim, atop on a rock mound in the center of the island. Ripley’s domain also contained a smaller house with an attached garage, and a boathouse. The island was surrounded by Van Arminge Pond, and beyond a stone seawall was Long Island Sound.

With oak floors and dark-wood paneling, the mansion’s shadowy and spooky interior resembled an elegant lodge. Scattered across three stories were bedrooms, sitting rooms, a solarium, a dark room, a steam room, and a gymnasium. Ripley began stocking the rooms with the artwork, furniture, rugs, and curios he’d been accumulating for years. His goal was to turn BION Island into a showcase for his booty from foreign lands. In time, the island would become his personal Odditorium, more museum than house and surely one of the most bizarre dwellings in America. At first, it was an absolute mess, the rooms cluttered with javelins, mastodon and elephant tusks, boomerangs, skeletons, and war drums. Turkish and Oriental rugs rose high in piles. The garage held wooden statues and carvings, python skins and stuffed animals.

Outside of his Bion Island home on one of his annual Christmas cards. By the mid-1930s, Ripley was living on the island full-time., From A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley.

Ripley’s island would become his refuge, a place to host elaborate dinner parties with friends. He was now one of the most well-known men in America, and among the most eligible of bachelors. “Almost always in public he is squiring with much gallantry something especially slick and saucy,” the columnist O. O. McIntyre wrote in the New York American. Ever dapper, he wore bespoke tailor-made suits accessorized with bright-colored shirts, bow ties, and two-tone shoes. Though he was bucktoothed, chubby, and not especially handsome, something about Ripley’s style and confidence attracted women. He dated writers and starlets, a Chinese ballerina, and a Japanese actress. Women came to work as secretaries or housekeepers, then stayed on as live-in lovers. “Women have a way of falling in love with Ripley,” wrote a female reporter for Radio Stars magazine, after spending a weekend at BION Island. Asked why he wasn’t married, he’d explain that his global travels prevented him from settling down. “I’d be glad to try matrimony if I could find a girl who is intelligent and charming and likes to travel,” he once said. In truth, he had already found the ideal partner in Ruth Ross, a Hungarian antiques dealer he’d met in Paris and who later immigrated to America.

By the mid-1930s, Ross, whom he’d nicknamed “Oakie,” had become Ripley’s traveling secretary and his lover. Oakie offered to help organize the messy contents of his new mansion and spent many days and nights in Mamaroneck, hiring domestic help while arranging the antiques and artwork. Thanks to Oakie’s efforts, Ripley began living and working on BION Island full time. With his various collections now on display, he loved to show off his estate to guests. With Hitler stirring up conflict in Europe, it was not an ideal time for overseas passenger travel so he scaled back from his multiple global trips and was forced to avoid Europe and Asia altogether.

He hired a carpenter to build a new bar in the boathouse and then purchased (or relieved from storage) oddball vessels to use on his pond, including a seal-skin kayak from Alaska, a boat of woven reeds from India, a dugout canoe from Peru, and a circular Guffa boat, similar to those he had seen on the Tigris in Baghdad. Guests often spent the bulk of their visit in the low-ceilinged basement bar, cool and dark as a pub. Ripley served cocktails from beneath the flags of countries he’d visited, scores of which dangled from the walls. Shelves were cluttered with an assortment of souvenirs, including sheep’s bells and bull whips; a collection of rare goblets, steins, and tankards; a narwhal tusk; and the dried penis of a whale. When guests asked what that was, Ripley would explain, “Let’s just say it was very dear to the whale.” In one rock-walled, grotto-like room, which was off-limits to female visitors, Ripley kept his collection of erotica. One visitor described the collection as “ranging from the revolting to the exquisitely executed.”

Just before the war Norbert Pearlroth had listened to Ripley one night, over dinner, describe how his life had played out in 10-year intervals. The year was 1939, and Ripley had just signed a new radio contract (worth $7,500 per show) and was homing in on visiting his 200th country. “In 1909 I began my career as an illustrator,” Ripley said. “In 1919, with the old New York Globe, I began a syndicated column. And in 1929 I joined King Features.” He told Pearlroth that, given this cycle, he was hoping for another ten years of life—meaning that it would come to an end in 1949. Ripley would get his wish, though his last decade was at times a troubled one. Oakie died in 1942, and another girlfriend, of Japanese background, was sent to an internment camp during the war. The constant parties on BION Island also took a toll. Ripley grew stouter, and stopped playing handball. His health was increasingly frail, and his behavior often erratic. Troubled by the war and frustrated by his inability to travel, he sniped at friends and colleagues.

And yet he still had the Believe It or Not touch. The one communications medium Ripley had yet to conquer was television, and in 1949 he launched a TV show based on his cartoon. It became an immediate hit. On May 24, 1949, Ripley was at the studio to tape his 13th show. In the middle of the program he slumped onto his desk, unconscious. It was a program, as it happens, devoted to the origins of “Taps,” the military dirge played at funerals. Ripley never got the chance to work the irony into his cartoon. He was dead within days.

But Robert LeRoy Ripley’s empire has survived, impressively. It is now run by a company called Ripley Entertainment, based in Orlando. The daily newspaper cartoon has continued uninterrupted. Versions of the TV show have aired on and off over the years, with Jack Palance famously hosting it in the mid-1980s. Dozens of Believe It or Not museums operate around the world. What no corporation could capture or sustain, however, is Ripley’s childlike enthusiasm and sense of wonder, which was always the most touching aspect of his career. He lived a life worthy of one of the characters in his own cartoon, and his defense of the man who carved all those tiny letters on a grain of rice performs double duty as a defense of his own achievement: “Could Lindbergh do that? . . . Could you?”